Limerick East): I thank the Senators for contributing to this debate. I found the speeches in general very supportive and many constructive suggestions were made. I will be able to take some of them into account under section 14 of the Bill which allows the Minister to draw up fairly detailed regulations on the implementation of this Bill. I should like to make general remarks initially which will cover the ground raised by many Senators and then I will try to deal with specific points raised.
First of all, it should be remembered that what we are talking about is giving the courts an alternative sanction which they can use instead of a prison sentence. It is not a soft approach, it is not something that would be imposed simply for minor offences. A community service order cannot be imposed in lieu of a fine or in lieu of probation. The Bill is specifically constructed so that where a justice or a judge considers that a prison sentence is appropriate under the sanctions available, he will now have an alternative and can sentence someone to work rather than to prison. This has obvious advantages.
The range of sanctions available to the courts at present is not sufficient in all cases to allow a judge or Justice to implement a sentence because it is more appropriate. There are occasions when a suspended sentence, or putting somebody on probation, or a fine, or a prison sentence is not entirely appropriate. There are occasions when a justice or a judge has either tried everything else or feels that everything else is inappropriate and is left with only one sanction, that is, a prison sentence. That is true especially in respect of short-term offenders. Consequently, we have many people in our prisons who should not be there at all. They are there because of the lack of an alternative sanction. When somebody is sentenced for a crime society demands retribution of some sort. The range of sanctions is limited. The judge or justice is put in the position of having to implement the best possible option in the limited sanctions available. This is an alternative sanction. It is another option available to a judge or justice. It is specifically an option in lieu of a prison sentence.
The question was raised here and in the Dáil why the option was not simply left open and allow the judge to impose it as he saw fit in lieu of probation or a fine. A judge makes a valid decision to fine somebody or put him or her on probation. The experience in other countries, especially in Britain, would suggest that if it was not a specific alternative to a prison sentence then people who are now fined and put on probation would be sentenced to community service orders. The actual scheme of community service orders would, instead of relieving pressure on the prison system and becoming an alternative to the sanctions available, become the practice. Instead of having a range of alternatives in dealing with prisoners, in the case of minor offences and in the case of short-term sentences or fines or probation the instinctive reaction would be to sentence people to work on all occasions. That is certainly not the intention of the Bill.
A prison sentence is frequently inappropriate for young offenders. Take the case of a 16 or 17 year old who is in court and the inclination of the judge is to sentence him or her to six months imprisonment. If that person is in a leaving certificate class and about to take examinations after a short period, if the judge goes ahead with the sentence there would be a form of double punishment because of the present sentence plus the deprivation and the lack of completion of the education course. Frequently what happens is that no action is taken in situations like that. A community service order in such a case would be very appropriate. A young person could continue his or her schooling and do community service work in the evening, on a Saturday or during school holiday time. Such offenders could continue with their training, work, apprenticeship or education. A rather similar point could be made about people in family circumstances. Is it appropriate to send to prison the main wage-earner in a family and make his wife and children a further charge on the State? Would it not be better if a man in those circumstances could work at the weekend, on Saturdays or during holidays? Another example is the case of a person who, if sentenced to prison might lose his job. Again there is a double punishment aspect here. Frequently what would happen is that a judge would hesitate to sentence in circumstances like that. Community service work could be appropriate in these circumstances.
I am pointing out the advantages, of the Bill before the House and the positive advantages of having an alternative system. There is one other advantage and it is an advantage which I stressed in the other House. It is not the reason why the Bill is being brought in. The Bill is being brought in for the reason I have outlined. There is a consequential advantage — it will reduce the pressure on the system which is at crisis proportions. Last year 1,200 people were shed from the prison system. "Shedding" is the technical term and you can take it as a general rule it is so. The cells in all our prisons are full all the time. If somebody is sentenced for a very serious crime in one of the courts for five, six, seven or eight years then space must be provided. The only way to provide it is to let somebody out who is on a short sentence. I am not talking about people being let out under strict supervision nor am I talking about sentences being mitigated because it is felt on expert advice that an appropriate portion of the sentence has been served. I am talking about simply letting people out to make space available for more serious offenders. Last year 1,200 people were shed from our prisons. It is obvious that the whole paraphernalia of justice would break down if the sanctions applied by the courts cannot be implemented. We have approximately 11,000 gardaí engaged in the prevention and detection of crime. We have free legal aid, courts and prisons and if at the end of the day an offender who was sentenced can walk through his local community again in, say, three weeks time or less, and virtually overtly insult the injured party and jeer at the gardaí, the system is breaking down.
If we cannot provide the space in the prisons to deal with the problems why should we be putting people into prisons who should not be there at all in the first place? People are worried about the cost of implementing this scheme. Obviously money will have to be provided. I hope when all Stages pass through the Seanad I will be in a position to make regulations and arrangements with the probation and welfare service to get them to identify appropriate work in various communities around the country.
I will not be in a position to implement this Bill until next year. There will be money provided in 1984 for this. It might be of interest to Senators to hear the cost. Suppose in a full year 350 orders were made, the cost per week will work out at £36.26 per community service order. If in a full year 500 orders were made the cost would be reduced to £28 approximately. If the number of orders made in a year went up to 700 the cost would be £18 per week. The average cost of maintaining a person in prison in 1982 for one week was £424. I could make a good case to the Ministers for Finance and the Public Service for community service orders if we can deal with offenders at a cost of £18 a week as against sending them to prison at a cost of £424 a week on average. That last figure is a frightening one. Apart from the other arguments there is a very strong economic argument for what is being proposed in the Bill. I do not want to give the impression that this is the reason it is being proposed. I have positive reasons for introducing this legislation and from the comments made by Senators it is quite clear that they accept them.
A number of specific points were raised. Senator Eoin Ryan was very supportive in what he said. There will be teething problems. The experience in other countries, however, is that community service orders work well. It is not an English idea. It was started in New Zealand. The British borrowed it. Now it has spread right through Europe and is also in Canada. It is a scheme that has worked well in European and other countries. We can learn from the difficulties they had.
Senator Fallon suggested bringing it in in a number of areas as a pilot scheme. The difficulty there is that justice would have to operate evenly in all parts of the State. To have one form of sentence in one District Court area or county would probably be unconstitutional if the same sanction was not available to an offender in the next county. We will have to bring it in as a national scheme and deal with the teething problems as they arise nationally rather than trying it out, as the Senator suggested.
Senator Ryan also made reference to the major Criminal Justice Bill. An enormous amount of work has been done by my predecessors and my Department officials over a number of years on the preparation of this Bill. I do not want to cast any aspersions on my predecessors but no memorandum was put to Government until I put one recently on this Bill. As this legislation would change many aspects of our criminal law obviously the sequence from memorandum to decision to draft Bill to final publication of the Bill is not something that we would handle lightly. I assure the House that there is no hesitation in proceeding with this. It is a priority of Government and I hope to have a Bill published before the Houses of the Oireachtas reassemble in the autumn.
Senator Ryan also asked about open centres and open prisons or semi-open prisons. There are three at present. There is Shelton Abbey, near Arklow. It is for adults and it holds about 60 prisoners. There is Shanganagh Castle which is near Bray. It is for juveniles under 21 and holds about 50. There is Loughan House in Cavan which is for adult offenders from 18 years of age upward. When it is fully operational it will hold about 120 maximum. It has now been re-opened for a number of weeks. The policy is to phase in the number of offenders rather than to have the full amount initially. It is building up fairly rapidly and is now somewhere in the mid-sixties.
Senator Eoin Ryan also made the point that there was no provision in the Estimates for 1983 and that is so. I do not think I will need money in 1983 because between drafting regulations and making the necessary arrangements it will be 1984. I intend to have money in the Estimates in 1984. In the meantime, the court rules, regulations and administrative arrangements will have to be worked out. Again I draw Senators attention to section 14 of this Bill which gives fairly wide powers of regulation to the Minister. That section will enable me to incorporate many of the very positive suggestions which have been made here.
Senator Durcan made the suggestion, which I agree with, that the probation and welfare service should link up with other agencies. This should be done. Manpower, AnCO and various youth employment agencies and so on would be appropriate for a link up.
A point has been made by a number of Senators and by Senator O'Leary specifically about whether it is appropriate that the consent of the offender should be required before a community service order is imposed. There would be a difficulty if consent was not required. Under various international obligations which we have and under practice in this country for many years, it would be totally inappropriate to say the least to impose what could be perceived as compulsory or forced labour on anybody. There are two reasons. The principal reason is, first of all, we do not want any perception that we are sentencing people to forced labour. Consequently consent to the principle of an offender working is important. Secondly it is unlikely that an offender who did not consent to being sentenced to work would actually complete the work satisfactorily. He would probably break down in the middle of the community service order, be taken back into court again and end up in prison.
I would make a distinction between consent and choice. It is not that the offender is being given a choice of sentence and asked which he would prefer. It is that the offender should consent to the idea of working under a community service order and that because he had expressed this consent he would avoid a prison sentence. I know Senator O'Leary has more specific points to make on that and I will take them up on Committee Stage when he raises them.
Senator Brendan Ryan was generally supportive. I know he has practical experience of dealing with offenders. I was interested in what he said. Some of the suggestions he made could be implemented in the regulations. As regards the Prisoners' Rights Organisation, of which he was an executive member previously, I am not aware of any harassment by gardaí of that organisation but if the Senator would like to have a word with me later on, I will discuss it with him. He made the point that gardaí are unacceptable in some areas. Obviously, this is something that should concern us all. There is a change in how gardaí are perceived. They are held in very high respect all the time by communities. We need to work constantly at the absolute trust which was there in the past to make sure that there is no breakdown in relationships between the Garda Síochána and the community. I would be particularly concerned in this respect.
Perhaps I could trot out a statistic which has been trotted out many times before in different arguments. With over 50 per cent of our population under 25 years of age, it is vitally important that the contact between our young population and the Garda is close and is maintained, and that there would be no possibility of alienating our young people from the security forces. The proportion of our population under 25 years of age is so large that we would be in great difficulty if this were ever to occur.
That is why I am pleased that the recruitment programme for gardaí is proceeding. Many young gardaí are being assigned now to our cities. In a change of policy of deployment, the traditional practice of not sending them to their home area has now been reversed. For example, when many of the young recruits who were born and reared in Dublin and who are applying now in increasing numbers for the Garda, are passed out in Templemore, they are being assigned to Dublin districts, many of them within two or three miles of their own homes.
A series of arguments militated against this in the past. It was not police policy in the past to do this. There are stronger arguments now, and in the urban areas people of urban background, people who were born and reared in a particular area, can be very effective as young policemen, having good community relationships with their own age group and their own peer group. The policy now is to assign them to, at least, their cities of origin and, very frequently, within a reasonably short distance of where they were born, reared and schooled.
Senator Ryan also made this point that why, since under the Bill a report from a probation officer is required before a community service is imposed, this should not be the practice in the case of other sanctions also. It is a valid point. It is outside the scope of the Bill and is something I would hope we might have a look at subsequently.
I have dealt with most of the points raised, except your own, a Leas-Chathaoirligh. You asked whether it was a copy of the UK legislation. It originated in New Zealand and came in there. We are learning a lot from the English experience. One of the things which came across most forcibly to me was, first of all, the point I made about the pilot schemes, which worked in Britain and, secondly, the point that when it was introduced in Britain originally, it was also an alternative for a fine. Many people who could be dealt with under fines were put on a community service order. This imposed an added burden.
The total Garda force is about 11,000 now. That is not taking into account the present recruitment scheme and the next recruitment scheme which will be called up shortly and recruits will be passing through Templemore at the end of 1983 and into 1984.
A point was also made about why offenders should be given the choice of how they should be punished. I have dealt with that. It is not a question of choice. It is a question of consent, so that they would consent to work rather than a perception of forced labour being put abroad. It is not a question of choice. I have dealt with the cost also.
There was talk about supervision not being full-time. We have to work out the actual details of the supervision. Obviously, if somebody is on community work, there will not be a supervisor there all the time. If somebody is on work anyway, the greatest supervision I think possible in any form of work is to see is the work satisfactorily completed at the end of a period. I hope this will be implemented by the probation and welfare officers who are very good. I hope it will be implemented in an imaginative way.
Anybody walking through any of our cities, towns, villages and, indeed the countryside, could identify in a day a whole range of things that need to be done. They do not require great monetary resources, but they do require manpower resources. Have you ever noticed the graffiti on our walls, for example, in towns and cities? Would it not be appropriate for young offenders to clean them off? What supervision is required? If they are removed, they are removed. That kind of work can be checked and supervised rather easily.
Some Senators expressed concern about a suggestion in my speech that community service orders could enable offenders to help with the disabled and the old, and people like that who are in need of help. The point made was that this would be difficult to sell and would probably cause concern in the community. I accept that point, but there are things that can be validly done. For example, we have had the experience of a number of old people's houses in a town or city. Sometimes the gardens remain undug. The grass is never cut. The hedges are not trimmed. The front gate or the fence is not painted. There is a whole range of activity that could be beneficial to the welfare of old people in our communities which would not necessarily involve close personal contact between the offender and the older person.
I am not ruling that out either because when we talk about offenders we tend to speak of them as if they were a homogeneous group. Of course they are not. The variations are vast. People are being sentenced now to terms of imprisonment who, under this scheme, could work on a community service order, and many old people would find no problem whatsoever in relating to them or having them there to help or to aid. I do not think it is possible for somebody like a Minister for Justice to specify a list of appropriate work and say this far shalt thou go and no further. This will have to be implemented imaginatively and carefully by the probation and welfare service in my Department. Work which would be appropriate in one particular area because of a particular set of social circumstances might be inappropriate in another area. The freedom should be there for the different types of work to be available and to be provided and to be supervised in a careful but imaginative way.
Senator Fallen talked about a number of points which I have dealt with already. He talked about the sentences and the length of sentence. The maximum sentence here is 240 hours in a year. It would be the maximum sentence also under a specific community service order. Obviously, if somebody is back in court again, without pre-empting the report of the welfare officer, it would be difficult to see how you could continue on the community service orders as an alternative sanction to imprisonment if they were perceived not to be working in the sense of providing no correction whatsoever.
The £300 fine which the Senator referred to as being unrealistic is the maximum fine. If somebody is sentenced to the maximum 240 hours, that could be eight hours a week over 30 weeks. If he decided not to do the work, obviously one line of approach being followed in the Bill is that you take that person back into court and the judge would have the discretion then to sentence him to imprisonment. Also the fact that somebody did not comply with the court order, the community service order, after giving his consent, would be an offence in itself. It would be at the discretion of the judge to impose whatever fine he thought appropriate, taking also into account the fact that he would probably be imposing a prison sentence anyway because the work was not carried out.
I have dealt with most of the points made. If there is any other specific point, I am sure I can deal with it on Committee Stage. I should like to thank Senators who contributed. Under section 14 which allows me to make the regulations, and also more informally when I will be discussing them with the probation and welfare section of my Department, many of the specific points raised by Senators can be met.
